Friday, February 14, 2014

Man, every time I kick off the illustration phase of a new chapter - starting at 0% - I just can't believe the amount of work that's lying ahead of me. And this time this is especially true. As you can see in the milestone illustration above, Chapter 6 is going to be a MONSTER of a chapter. It's pretty much the size of Chapter 1 and 2 combined! It even makes the giant Chapter 5 look ridiculously small. And the beast has a name! The title of Chapter 6 of the Wormworld Saga is:

Chapter 6 - The Smoldering Doom

There you go. What a fitting title. Everything will go down. I will die trying to battle this beast.

Just kidding! In fact this chapter is so long for a very good reason. Since there also exists a book edition of the Wormworld Saga for some time now (in German and French as of this date) I started to wonder how many pages future books should have and how many chapters to put into each one of them. The first book contains the first three chapters which add up to 90 story pages which in fact is a very nice chunk to read. The second book is going to be a bit shorter containing Chapter 4 and 5. For the third book I'd love to have more pages to read again and so I decided to make Chapter 6 and 7 bigger, so that combined they will aproximately fill 100 pages.

The crazy thing is that although I intentionally gave me more room to "play" with this time I don't feel like I had more room that I needed. The different sequences in this chapter are still very concise and I often had to shorten things up in order to not run out of space. There are some more atmospheric shots in this chapter compared to the other ones and I even have some scenes in which there's no dialog at all. But from my point of view there's no "wasted" space in this chapter and I really think I wouldn't have been able to make it any shorter. Maybe it's true what they say: you'll always fill up the space that you're given.

Ok, so from now on there will be milestone updates again. With preview pictures! Man, I'm looking forward to that!

Monday, February 3, 2014

It's February! I've finished my work on the game project I was talking about in my last few blog posts and now it's finally time to start the production of Chapter 6. First thing I had to do was to make some room for new chapters on the website. Our nice paper toys came in handy to temporarily fill some of the empty space on the new shelve. I have to make more chapters quickly in order to fill it up properly! :)

The Chapter 6 icon is going to reflect the milestones of the production so you will be able to check on my progress with a glance at the website. The main production steps will be:

Finishing the preliminary version

Our new baby kept us busy and I wasn't able to finish the preliminary version before the begin of production which was my original plan. Now that I can concentrate my time on the Wormworld Saga it should be finished soon though.

Title announcement and milestone steps

As soon as the preliminary version is finished I will present you the title of the new chapter and you will get the milestone update charts that you are used to. Every milestone update will come with preview images!

Editing

The translators and I will start to work on the different translations of the chapter as soon as possible (we can do it already with the prelim version) and when the illustrations are all finished I will do the word balloon layout and create the special content for Chapter 6.

Launch

My goal is to finish my work on Chapter 6 at the end of May. The closer we come to that date the more accurately will I be able to predict the actual launch date. With the preceding five chapters I've always launched as soon as possible. This time I want to make sure that the launch on the website will not happen before the launch in the app. I also have to coordinate the launch with the French website so there might be a little bit more waiting time than usual between the 100% milestone mark and the actual launch of the new chapter.

I'm really looking forward to the next few months. It's such a blessing that the budget for this chapters has been secured and I will work hard in order to make this a very special new chapter of the Wormworld Saga. I've been spinning it around in my head for over 9 months now and I'm eager to see it realized. I've got some pretty ambitious artwork lying in front of me and I have to admit that I'm a little bit nervous if everything will turn out the way I'm envisioning it. It's such a bizarre feeling to look at the long road and to imagine that at some point it will lie behind oneself. But then I'm looking at the existing 5 chapters and realize that it can be done. It's hard to believe but the evidence can't be ignored.